WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Why are you having an outage at your Hildreth Compressor Station
in Suwannee County, Florida, Sabal Trail?
And are there continuing stink leaks at your site without a compressor
at Dunnellon, Florida in Marion County?
Meanwhile, you’re still shipping nothing.
For that $3 or $4 billion, much more
electricity from solar power
could be online right now in Florida, shutting down gas power plants
instead of building them.

Noah Valenstein, formerly SRWMD, now FDEP Secretary,
has appointed Eric Draper of Audubon Florida to head Florida State Parks.
The same Eric Draper who twice endorsed Sabal Trail in writing,
and did nothing to stop Sabal Trail from drilling under the Suwannee, Santa Fe, or Withlacoochee (South) Rivers, nor under the Suwannee River State Park that he will now oversee.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Department of Environmental
Protection Secretary Noah Valenstein today announced three key
appointments to DEP’s leadership team, as part of its continued
focus on the protection of Florida’s prized properties through the
management of Florida’s world-renowned state park system and land
acquisition and conservation. Eric Draper will join the DEP team as
the Director of Florida State Parks, effective Nov. 28, and Callie
DeHaven will serve as Interim Director of the Division of State
Lands effective Nov. 27, subject to Governor and Cabinet
confirmation. David Clark, who has previously served as Director of
State Lands and has been acting Deputy Secretary of Land and
Recreation, has officially been appointed Deputy Secretary.

Asked why a pipeline dispatcher apparently told the fire department
that “this was a new system and they are still
learning,” Grover responds that “it would be illogical
to speculate as to what the fire department has quoted as part of a
conversation.”

Or are those just Pinocchio donkey ears?
That would be more logical.

Who do you believe?
A local county fire department, or someone paid by a pipeline company
to put the best face on any event?
Especially when she didn’t actually deny anything Marion County Fire Rescue reported?

The Sabal Trail Pipeline, a new natural gas pipeline that critics
have charged is uncomfortably close to Florida’s main aquifer,
“operated safely throughout Hurricane Irma,” a
spokesperson with the pipeline operator tells ConsumerAffairs.

“We were and continue to be able to meet any customer
needs,” says an email from Andrea Grover of Enbridge Energy,
the natural gas company behind the Sabal Trail Pipeline.
“Operations was not affected by the hurricane impacts.”

Andrea Grover’s linkedin page
lists her as
“Director, Stakeholder Outreach at Enbridge (Oil & Gas)”.
For four years we were told the pipeline’s “stakeholders”
were landowners along the way.

But is Sabal Trail even serving those customers well?
Cody Suggs reported yesterday from the Hildreth Compressor Station site
near O’Brien, in Suwannee County, Florida, that power is still off there
and it took two days for trees to be cleared off the access road.

Natural gas began flowing through the Sabal Trail Pipeline in June
2017. People like John Quarterman, a Georgia landowner and activist
with WWALS Watershed Coalition, a group that aims to protect
watersheds in Georgia and Florida, say that federal regulators are
typically asleep at the wheel for these projects.

“We have this 500-mile improvised explosive device, under our
rivers, next to our schools and next to people’s houses and nobody
is handling pipeline safety,” he tells ConsumerAffairs.

Florida’s landscape is characterized by
karst terrain, or land made of porous limestone, caverns, and water
dissolving into the bedrock, all of which are a recipe for
sinkholes. Man-made infrastructure can increase the chance of a
sinkhole forming, and so can intense rain.

“Man-induced sinkholes typically involve collapse of old mine
workings, drainage infrastructure or other underground
workings,” explained meteorologist Jim Andrews in one recent
report. “Naturally, such can fail over time, and rainfall can
be a major factor.”

In fact, at least four homes have been evacuated in central Florida
this week after sinkholes formed in the wake of Hurricane Irma,
according to reporters on the scene. Still, Enbridge Energy says
that their pipeline can handle sinkhole-prone terrain.

“While opposition has raised the issue of the pipeline being
constructed in karst terrain, this was thoroughly examined by the
appropriate federal and state agencies,” responds Enbridge
representative Andrea Grover by email. “They concluded it was
unlikely that Sabal Trail would impact springs or the Floridan
Aquifer in the karst regions. Sabal Trail is well equipped to safely
construct and operate the pipeline in karst areas.”

Violations Sabal Trail and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP)
told us would not happen,
under oath in WWALS vs. Sabal Trail & FDEP (October 2015),
have already been happening.

But Quarterman says he does not trust the company to voluntarily
report any issues that may arise. Activists with his group who live
along the pipeline route have been tracking the project themselves,
both before and after Hurricane Irma, to make sure no leaks,
sinkholes underneath the pipeline, or any other issues have
occurred.

Valdosta announced its WWTP would be “manned around the clock”, so I
called down there before 8AM this Saturday morning,
and somebody did answer immediately.
I told him as Suwannee Riverkeeper I was concerned for people downstream
who don’t want any spills during the upcoming rains, so I was glad to see it was true they were there.
I asked him if they had backup generators.
He said yes.
Of course,
that doesn’t handle every manhole cover.
We shall see.
Don’t spill, Valdosta!
(Or Lowndes County, or Tifton, or anybody else.)

Currently expecting somewhere between 4 and 10 inches of rain on Valdosta.
Map from National Hurricane Center, 2017-09-09 8AM.

To see Sabal Fail in inaction at Dunnellon,
jump to The Dunnellon odorant leaks,
where the pipeline stooges wrapped it in towels, sprayed a deodorant, and waited until morning.
Really, according to the incident report from Marion County Fire Rescue.
It doesn’t get better in this summary: none of the state or federal
permitting or safety agencies did anything, leaving Marion County
to deal with the situation unassisted.